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Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Segmentation and Classification: Advancements, Challenges and Applications

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A special issue of Journal of Imaging (ISSN 2313-433X). This special issue belongs to the section "Medical Imaging".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2024) | Viewed by 9821

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Ebrahim Karami

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Guest Editor

Department of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL A1B 3X5, Canada
Interests: machine learning; computer vision; biomedical engineering; wireless communications and networks; remote sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue aims to explore the latest advancements, challenges, and applications of deep learning techniques in the field of biomedical image segmentation and classification. Biomedical image analysis plays a crucial role in various medical domains, enabling the accurate identification, segmentation, and classification of structures, organs, and anomalies. Deep learning, with its ability to learn complex features and patterns from large-scale datasets, has revolutionized biomedical image analysis, offering significant improvements in segmentation and classification accuracy and efficiency. This Special Issue welcomes original research papers, review articles, and case studies that present novel deep learning methodologies, architectures, and algorithms, as well as their practical applications and implications in biomedical image segmentation and classification. The collection of contributions will provide a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art techniques, identify challenges and limitations, and pave the way for future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.

Dr. Ebrahim Karami
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Imaging is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

biomedical image segmentation
biomedical image classification
computer-aided diagnosis
deep learning for ultrasound imaging
deep learning for infrared imaging
deep learning for MRI and FMRI imaging
deep learning for X-ray imaging
lesion detection with deep learning
cancer detection and classification with deep learning
biomedical image denoising and enhancement using deep learning
deep learning for biomedical object localization

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

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14 pages, 4516 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Elevating Chest X-ray Image Super-Resolution with Residual Network Enhancement

by Anudari Khishigdelger, Ahmed Salem and Hyun-Soo Kang

J. Imaging 2024, 10(3), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging10030064 - 4 Mar 2024

Viewed by 1202

Abstract

Chest X-ray (CXR) imaging plays a pivotal role in diagnosing various pulmonary diseases, which account for a significant portion of the global mortality rate, as recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO). Medical practitioners routinely depend on CXR images to identify anomalies and make critical clinical decisions. Dramatic improvements in super-resolution (SR) have been achieved by applying deep learning techniques. However, some SR methods are very difficult to utilize due to their low-resolution inputs and features containing abundant low-frequency information, similar to the case of X-ray image super-resolution. In this paper, we introduce an advanced deep learning-based SR approach that incorporates the innovative residual-in-residual (RIR) structure to augment the diagnostic potential of CXR imaging. Specifically, we propose forming a light network consisting of residual groups built by residual blocks, with multiple skip connections to facilitate the efficient bypassing of abundant low-frequency information through multiple skip connections. This approach allows the main network to concentrate on learning high-frequency information. In addition, we adopted the dense feature fusion within residual groups and designed high parallel residual blocks for better feature extraction. Our proposed methods exhibit superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) SR methods, delivering enhanced accuracy and notable visual improvements, as evidenced by our results. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Segmentation and Classification: Advancements, Challenges and Applications)

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17 pages, 1236 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A CNN Hyperparameters Optimization Based on Particle Swarm Optimization for Mammography Breast Cancer Classification

by Khadija Aguerchi, Younes Jabrane, Maryam Habba and Amir Hajjam El Hassani

J. Imaging 2024, 10(2), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging10020030 - 24 Jan 2024

Viewed by 1709

Abstract

Breast cancer is considered one of the most-common types of cancers among females in the world, with a high mortality rate. Medical imaging is still one of the most-reliable tools to detect breast cancer. Unfortunately, manual image detection takes much time. This paper proposes a new deep learning method based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Convolutional Neural Networks are widely used for image classification. However, the determination process for accurate hyperparameters and architectures is still a challenging task. In this work, a highly accurate CNN model to detect breast cancer by mammography was developed. The proposed method is based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm in order to look for suitable hyperparameters and the architecture for the CNN model. The CNN model using PSO achieved success rates of 98.23% and 97.98% on the DDSM and MIAS datasets, respectively. The experimental results proved that the proposed CNN model gave the best accuracy values in comparison with other studies in the field. As a result, CNN models for mammography classification can now be created automatically. The proposed method can be considered as a powerful technique for breast cancer prediction. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Segmentation and Classification: Advancements, Challenges and Applications)

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15 pages, 1596 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Lesion Detection in Optical Coherence Tomography with Transformer-Enhanced Detector

by Hanya Ahmed, Qianni Zhang, Ferranti Wong, Robert Donnan and Akram Alomainy

J. Imaging 2023, 9(11), 244; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging9110244 - 7 Nov 2023

Viewed by 1545

Abstract

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging imaging tool in healthcare with common applications in ophthalmology for the detection of retinal diseases and in dentistry for the early detection of tooth decay. Speckle noise is ubiquitous in OCT images, which can hinder diagnosis by clinicians. In this paper, a region-based, deep learning framework for the detection of anomalies is proposed for OCT-acquired images. The core of the framework is Transformer-Enhanced Detection (TED), which includes attention gates (AGs) to ensure focus is placed on the foreground while identifying and removing noise artifacts as anomalies. TED was designed to detect the different types of anomalies commonly present in OCT images for diagnostic purposes and thus aid clinical interpretation. Extensive quantitative evaluations were performed to measure the performance of TED against current, widely known, deep learning detection algorithms. Three different datasets were tested: two dental and one CT (hosting scans of lung nodules, livers, etc.). The results showed that the approach verifiably detected tooth decay and numerous lesions across two modalities, achieving superior performance compared to several well-known algorithms. The proposed method improved the accuracy of detection by 16–22% and the Intersection over Union (IOU) by 10% for both dentistry datasets. For the CT dataset, the performance metrics were similarly improved by 9% and 20%, respectively. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Segmentation and Classification: Advancements, Challenges and Applications)

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Other

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13 pages, 1782 KiB

Open AccessBrief Report

Brain Age Prediction Using 2D Projections Based on Higher-Order Statistical Moments and Eigenslices from 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging Volumes

by Johan Jönemo and Anders Eklund

J. Imaging 2023, 9(12), 271; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging9120271 - 6 Dec 2023

Viewed by 1446

Abstract

Brain age prediction from 3D MRI volumes using deep learning has recently become a popular research topic, as brain age has been shown to be an important biomarker. Training deep networks can be very computationally demanding for large datasets like the U.K. Biobank (currently 29,035 subjects). In our previous work, it was demonstrated that using a few 2D projections (mean and standard deviation along three axes) instead of each full 3D volume leads to much faster training at the cost of a reduction in prediction accuracy. Here, we investigated if another set of 2D projections, based on higher-order statistical central moments and eigenslices, leads to a higher accuracy. Our results show that higher-order moments do not lead to a higher accuracy, but that eigenslices provide a small improvement. We also show that an ensemble of such models provides further improvement. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Segmentation and Classification: Advancements, Challenges and Applications)

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9 pages, 2411 KiB

Open AccessBrief Report

WindowNet: Learnable Windows for Chest X-ray Classification

by Alessandro Wollek, Sardi Hyska, Bastian Sabel, Michael Ingrisch and Tobias Lasser

J. Imaging 2023, 9(12), 270; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging9120270 - 6 Dec 2023

Viewed by 1836

Abstract

Public chest X-ray (CXR) data sets are commonly compressed to a lower bit depth to reduce their size, potentially hiding subtle diagnostic features. In contrast, radiologists apply a windowing operation to the uncompressed image to enhance such subtle features. While it has been shown that windowing improves classification performance on computed tomography (CT) images, the impact of such an operation on CXR classification performance remains unclear. In this study, we show that windowing strongly improves the CXR classification performance of machine learning models and propose WindowNet, a model that learns multiple optimal window settings. Our model achieved an average AUC score of 0.812 compared with the 0.759 score of a commonly used architecture without windowing capabilities on the MIMIC data set. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Segmentation and Classification: Advancements, Challenges and Applications)

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9 pages, 2417 KiB

Open AccessBrief Report

Placental Vessel Segmentation Using Pix2pix Compared to U-Net

by Anouk van der Schot, Esther Sikkel, Marèll Niekolaas, Marc Spaanderman and Guido de Jong

J. Imaging 2023, 9(10), 226; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging9100226 - 16 Oct 2023

Viewed by 1442

Abstract

Computer-assisted technologies have made significant progress in fetoscopic laser surgery, including placental vessel segmentation. However, the intra- and inter-procedure variabilities in the state-of-the-art segmentation methods remain a significant hurdle. To address this, we investigated the use of conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) for fetoscopic image segmentation and compared their performance with the benchmark U-Net technique for placental vessel segmentation. Two deep-learning models, U-Net and pix2pix (a popular cGAN model), were trained and evaluated using a publicly available dataset and an internal validation set. The overall results showed that the pix2pix model outperformed the U-Net model, with a Dice score of 0.80 [0.70; 0.86] versus 0.75 [0.0.60; 0.84] (p-value < 0.01) and an Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.70 [0.61; 0.77] compared to 0.66 [0.53; 0.75] (p-value < 0.01), respectively. The internal validation dataset further validated the superiority of the pix2pix model, achieving Dice and IoU scores of 0.68 [0.53; 0.79] and 0.59 [0.49; 0.69] (p-value < 0.01), respectively, while the U-Net model obtained scores of 0.53 [0.49; 0.64] and 0.49 [0.17; 0.56], respectively. This study successfully compared U-Net and pix2pix models for placental vessel segmentation in fetoscopic images, demonstrating improved results with the cGAN-based approach. However, the challenge of achieving generalizability still needs to be addressed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Segmentation and Classification: Advancements, Challenges and Applications)

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